Thank you to all the WSL-A teams and practitioners involved in the project! 🤝 And to the support team

11/11

3️⃣Inform manipulation of drill constraints to achieve desired intensity, to balance TEC-tac & physical development goals

⬇️🚨

🏆This study provides power-law relationship reference values to evaluate tactical-technical drill intensity in academy environments

10/11

💡 How do you know if a drill is ‘high intensity’?

1️⃣Understand the peak match demands first. E.g. what is the greatest overall distance covered by a player in any minute period (m/min)?
2️⃣Compare duration matched drill intensity to peak match intensity

⬇️

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⚽️Practical Applications⚽️

📈Use variability values to identify meaningful changes in volume & intensity between matches ➡️ inform training programming

(cont. ⬇️)

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(Cont.)

academy practitioners can be confident using the peak reference values from this study to evaluate tactical-technical drill intensities

➡️Between-match variability greatest for Sprint Distance

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📣 Key findings 📣

➡️ Outfield players experience similar physical match demands in WSL Academy, regardless of their position

➡️ Little variability between teams for peak physical performance variables so (cont.) ⬇️

6/11

The next step was understanding

2️⃣ What are the physical match characteristics?
*study on WSL A teams only

📈An important level to ensure players are exposed to appropriate running speeds to support preparing players to successfully progress to elite senior (WSL) football

5/11

1️⃣ What are the current physical training characteristics in elite female football?

✅ Published in these studies:

www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

4/11

1️⃣How can we optimise physical preparation for match play?
2️⃣How can we optimise progression between competitive levels

The first steps to solving these problems was understanding: ⬇️

3/11

To our knowledge this is the first study to report sources of variability in elite academy female football (multi-club).

As part of the FA Demands of the Game Project we identified 🔑 performance problems we needed to address:

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